A moment’s silence, Herb Caen, 1982

Memorial Day. Death takes a holiday, a holiday that may itself be dying, having outlived its uselessness. “They did not die in vain,” even though we know they did, and then comes the old wheeze about people who don’t learn from history being condemned to repeat it. So we mourn the dead, while living it up on a three-day binge as our leaders vote billions for bombs and pennies for food stamps. It must make sense. As my dear old Dad used to say about the great men and women in Washington, “If they didn’t know what they were doing, they wouldn’t be there.” He really believed that. The world was small and naive. Today, only the weapons have grown sophisticated. “We have not changed our way of thinking,” lamented Einstein, who might be surprised, wherever he is, that the world is still in one piece. More or less.

The only reason we still have Memorial Day is that it’s time for a three-day holiday. It’s good for business and keeps us hard-working folks from going bananas. If there weren’t a Memorial Day we’d have nothing but two-day holidays between February’s “Presidents Day” and July Fourth. Aside from that, the timing makes no sense. Mourning the dead should take place on gray, rainy days — November 11 seems about right — not on the last day of May, when springtime is at its gaudy height, the world is young again and even the Giants are not out of contention, mathematically.

I realize it borders on bad taste to say this, as you head for the tennis courts or break out the spinnaker or simply sleep late, but let us remember the American dead this weekend, including the dead this weekend will produce. “The last full measure of devotion.” They gave it from Ticonderoga to Antietam, from St. Lo to Inchon, from Little Bighorn to Hue. Raise your Bloody Mary in a salute to the bloody battle of the Bulge, and then continue to work on your suntan. The guys who fell at Kasserine didn’t realize it at the time, but that’s what they were fighting for, so give them a few seconds of your time-and-a-half holiday attention. Hell, maybe they didn’t die in vain after all. Here we all are, living the good life under the grand old flag, and not a mushroom cloud in the sky.

I never tire of quoting old H.V. Kaltenborn, the late radio commentator, who kept saying during his broadcasts at the beginning of World War II that “the awful geography lesson continues.” We learned a lot in a short time. Kids we grew up with died in faraway islands with strange-sounding beachheads, their bodies bobbing in the surf. Paratrooper Bob Ritchie, who edited my copy at the prewar Chronicle, died at Bastogne, a week after we’d played pool in Luxembourg. In the whole war, I fired three shots in anger, at a church steeple in Carentan, just after D-Day. A German sniper fell out and everybody yelled “I got him!” After the war, I went duck hunting with Trader Vic Bergeron and we fired simultaneously. As a duck fell, the Trader yelled “I got him!” and I saw that German body again.

Sure, if you didn’t get killed or shot up too badly, it was fun. You sweltered, you froze, you performed ridiculous duties, but you felt oddly free, though life couldn’t have been more restricted. Only years later could the veterans of World War II bring themselves to say out loud that those were the best years of their lives. Young, innocent and winning — for the last time. Korea was uglier and Vietnam was nightmare and tragedy. After World War III, there will be no Memorial Days.

On this Memorial Day weekend, let us salute the survivors, too — the walking wounded, the battlers in the front line of the urban wars. In San Francisco, we see them every day: the legless guy on the wooden platform alongside I. Magnin’s, the sweet-faced blind woman near the Emporium, the guy on Geary coaxing mournful tunes out of his harmonica, the young man at Hallidie who uses the stumps of what is left of his arms to play an electronic keyboard. On Turk, the “indigents” — the jobless, the losers, the naked and the near dead — stretch out with their backs against the wall, getting a suntan worthy of Palm Beach. A tiny Vietnamese girl walks past, wiggling in a hula-hoop. They whistle at her. Her smile is dazzling.

Life can be hard in the beautiful city. Let’s hear it for the troops who keep going, somehow — the bootblacks and the bellmen, the cabbies and the newsies, the Muni bus drivers and their well-jolted passengers, the waiters with sore feet, the waitresses with sore backs and the mad messengers on their bikes. The world has been made safe for democracy — our little Memorial Day lie — but, as JFK said, life is not fair, even on this fairest day in May. Today, a moment’s silence, please, for those who died bravely and those who live gallantly. They make better people out of us all.

This column originally appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle on May 30, 1982.